page_title: Saturday night special
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Saturday night special / Regulation / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Rohm RG66 revolver in 22LR
context_page_description: Saturday night special is a colloquial term in the United States and Canada for inexpensive, compact, small-caliber handguns of perceived low quality. Some states define these junk guns by means of composition or material strength. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, they were commonly referred to as suicide specials.
context_section_description: The earliest law prohibiting inexpensive handguns was enacted in Tennessee, in the form of the "Army and Navy Law", passed in 1879, shortly after the 14th amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1875; previous laws invalidated by the constitutional amendment had stated that black freedmen could not own or carry any manner of firearm. The Army and Navy Law prohibited the sale of "belt or pocket pistols, or revolvers, or any other kind of pistols, except army or navy pistols", which were prohibitively expensive for black freedmen and poor whites to purchase. These were large pistols in .36 caliber ("navy") or .44 caliber ("army"), and were the military issue cap and ball black-powder revolvers used during the Civil War by both Union and Confederate ground troops. The effect of the law was to restrict handgun possession to the upper economic classes.
  The next major attempt to regulate inexpensive firearms was the Gun Control Act of 1968, which used the "sporting purposes" test and a points system to exclude many small, inexpensive handguns which had been imported from European makers such as Röhm.
  Most manufacturers in the US were not directly impacted by the Gun Control Act, as they were not subject to the import restrictions, and for the most part they did not manufacture compact, inexpensive handguns that competed with the banned imports. However, demand for inexpensive handguns still existed and a number of new companies were formed to fill that gap. In an effort to cut costs, many of these guns were made with cast components made of the zinc alloy zamak rather than the more typical machined or cast steel. As a result, legislation against "junk guns" subsequently targeted the zinc frames used in construction by specifying a melting point. The development of polymer-framed guns, which will burn at temperatures much lower than the commonly specified 800 °F (427 °C) led to this becoming ineffective. Subsequent legislation regulated size (such as barrel lengths under 3 inches (7.6 cm)), materials (such as zinc), or low-cost manufacturing techniques (e.g., density requirements that specifically ban inexpensive powder cast metals), Some of these legal restrictions are based on product liability law.
caption: Röhm RG-66, an example of an inexpensive "Saturday night special" banned from import by the Gun Control Act of 1968
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